Electronic devices comprising a display and intended for processing data provide users with a user interface with which the user may operate the device. Typical examples of such devices are personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDA) and recently also terminal equipment of cellular radio systems. The user interface provided by the devices usually comprises a graphical display, a pointer device, such as a mouse or a digital pen, and/or a keyboard. With the interface, the user may perform various actions on data objects, such as editing, saving, printing, for example.
In the past, performing these actions required the user to browse menus and select a command from a list. To increase the user friendliness of the user interfaces a drag-and-drop-technique (DnD) has been introduced. In DnD, the user may select a data object, such as an icon representing a file, using a pointer device, such as a mouse, and drag and drop the object to an icon representing a printer in order to print the file. Correspondingly, dragging and dropping a data object to an icon representing a data storage, such as a folder or a disk drive, copies the data object to that data storage. DnD thus increases the usability of the user interface.
However, the DnD requires the user to be rather accurate with the pointing device. The dragging and dropping must be performed precisely on top of the predetermined icons in order to perform the given action. This may be difficult especially in portable devices. Furthermore, if the electronic device has a small display, the workspace may be limited. Icons on the display reduce the useful workspace even more.